Grace Hour: 50 Years after The Poor People’s Campaign

In 1967, a year before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., set the stage for The Poor People’s Campaign, saying, “I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…[W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.” The intention of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign was to set before people’s eyes “the plight of America’s poor of all races” in order to unsettle the unjust systems holding them in dehumanizing poverty.

Today, 50 years after the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, Christians are still called to be disturbers of a false peace – the sort of oppressive power that attains peace by silencing the voices of those on the margins and keeping them out of sight. Join us as we continue to explore theologies of liberation through the lens of the work of James H. Cone and The Poor People’s Campaign. Katelyn Kenney will lead us through the Campaign’s report (download it here: PPC-Report-Draft-1 ) on the campaign’s four core issue areas: racism, poverty, the war economy/militarism, and ecological destruction. This preliminary analysis was released at the launch of the new Campaign in Washington D.C. on December 4, 2017. Initial findings reveal that, by many measures, these problems are worse today than they were five decades ago. Let us seek understanding and God’s Spirit of restless hope together as we engage in conversation and action.